CHAPTER SIX - The Fifth Initiation . . . The Resurrection and Ascension - Part 1

CHAPTER SIX

The Fifth Initiation . . . The Resurrection and Ascension

KEY THOUGHT

"Apart from Christ we
know neither what our life nor our death is; we do not know what God is nor
what we ourselves are." — Pascal: Pensées

"There is a Soul above
the soul of each,

A mightier soul which yet to
each belongs!

There is a sound made of all
human speech,

And numerous as the concourse
of all songs:

And in that Soul lives each,
in each that Soul,

Tho' all the ages are its
lifetime vast;

Each soul that dies in its
most sacred whole

Receiveth life that shall for
ever last." — Richard Watson Dixon

[231]

CHAPTER SIX

The Fifth Initiation . . . The Resurrection and Ascension

This initiation is divided
into two halves, and of neither of them do we know very much. The detail of the
Resurrection episode, or crisis, in Christ's life is left untold by the writers
of the New Testament. It was not possible for them to know more. After the
Crucifixion we are told little of Christ's own life, or what occupied Him
between the time He rose again until He left the company of the Apostles, and
"ascended into Heaven"—a symbolic phrase which can mean very little
to any of us. The crucial initiation for humanity to understand at this time is
the fourth. Only when we have mastered the significance of service and sacrifice
can the fact of immortality and its true meaning be revealed to us. How Christ
rose, what were the processes undergone, in exactly what body He appeared, we
cannot tell. We are assured by the Apostles that it resembled the one He had
previously employed, but whether it was the same body miraculously resurrected;
whether it was His spiritual body, which appeared to be the same to the
physical eyes of those who loved Him, or whether He had constructed an entirely
new body on the same general lines as the previous one, it is not possible for
us to say; neither is it possible for us to be confident that the vision of the
disciples was not supernormal or that, through the intensification of His
expressed divinity, Christ had so stimulated their inner vision that they saw
clairvoyantly, or in another dimension. The important matter was that He did
rise again, that He was seen of many, [232] and
that the fact of His resurrection was credited in the minds of His friends and
for the two or three centuries after His departure.

The psychology of the
disciples is the best proof we have of the reality of their conviction that
death could not hold the Saviour, and that after death He was present and
living among them. It is difficult for us to gain this high achievement in consciousness
which they showed. Apparently their world had come to an end upon the Cross.
Christ had apparently failed them, and instead of being the divine Son of God,
and King of the Jews, He was nothing but an ordinary man, convicted of treason
and punished as a common malefactor. What they must have endured during the
three days of His absence it is not hard for us to imagine. Hopelessness,
despair, the loss of confidence in themselves and of prestige among their
friends; the cause for which they had been so ready to dedicate themselves, as
they tramped with Christ from place to place in the Holy Land, had ended and
collapsed. Their Leader was discredited. Then something happened to alter the
whole trend of their thought. All that had been lost of confidence and hope and
purpose was restored, and the first few centuries of the Christian history
(before theology gave a turn to interpretation, and so altered the Gospel of
love into a cult of separation) reveal to us

"... a company of men
and women full of confidence, enthusiasm and courage, ready to face persecution
and death, eager missionaries. What has given them this new character? Not long
before some of them had fled in dismay at the first threat of personal danger.
When Jesus was crucified they had lost the last glimmer of hope that he might
prove to be the Christ. When he was placed in the tomb, Christianity was dead
and buried too. Now we meet these men and women a few weeks later and they are
utterly changed. It is not that there is some faint return of hope among a few
of them. All are completely certain that Jesus is indeed the Christ. What has
happened to cause this transformation? Their answer is unanimous: on the third
day he rose from the dead." [ccxxxvii]1

[233]

"Christ is risen,"
is their cry, and because He has risen the kingdom of God can go forward upon
earth, and His message of love can be widely distributed. They know now, past
all controversy, that He has overcome death, and that in the years that lie
ahead they will see death vanquished. That they expected an immediate kingdom
and that they looked to see the fact of immortality universally recognised is
evident from their writings and their enthusiasm. That they were mistaken,
nearly two thousand years of Christianity has proved. We are not yet citizens of
a divine kingdom definitely manifesting upon earth, the fear of death is as
strong as ever, and the fact of immortality is still but a source of
speculation to millions. But it was their sense of time that was at fault, and
their failure to understand the slow processes of nature. Evolution moves
slowly, and it is only today that we are truly on the verge of the
demonstration of God's kingdom upon earth. Because this is the end of an age,
we know that before long the hold death has on the human being, and the terror
which the angel of death inspires, will disappear. They will vanish because we
shall regard death as only another step on the way towards light and life, and
shall realise that, as the Christ life expresses itself in and through human
beings, they will demonstrate to themselves, and in the world, the reality of
immortality.

The key to the overcoming of
death and to the processes of realising the meaning and nature of eternity and
the continuity of life can with safety be revealed only when love holds sway
over the human consciousness, and where the good of the whole, and not the
selfish good of the individual, comes to be the supreme regard. Only through
love (and service as the expression of love) can the real message of Christ be
understood and men pass on towards a joyful resurrection. Love makes us
humbler, and at the same time wiser. It penetrates to the heart of reality and
has a faculty of discovering the truth hidden by a form. The early Christians
were simple in this way because they loved one another, because [234] they loved Christ and the Christ within each other.
Dr. Grensted points this out in the following words, giving us a fine summation
of the attitude of the early Christians and of their approach, in those
enthusiastic days, to Christ and to life in the world:

"They spoke in plain
terms of God. They did not think of Jesus of Nazareth as a crucial experiment.
They knew Him as Friend and Master, and they flung their whole being into the
enthusiasm of His friendship and service. Their preaching was the good news
about Jesus. They assumed that men already meant something when they spoke of
God, and, without challenging the inheritance which they received from Judaism,
they set side by side with it the Jesus whom they had known living, and dead,
and alive again. They had been through much more than a time of inexplicable
miracles, healings, and voices, and a strange mastery over Nature itself, and
at the end a conquest of death. If they had told the world, and us, these
things alone, they would have been believed. Such stories have always found a
hearing. And men would still have known nothing more of the meaning of God. But
their experience had been one of such a Friendship as man had never known, of
disastrous failure and a forgiveness beyond all believing, and of a new, a
free, a creative life. Nothing of all this was of their own achievement. They
knew they were men remade, and they knew that the mode of their remaking was
love. This was a providence, a deliverance, greater and more significant than
anything that the Jew had ever claimed for the Creator-God. Yet they could not
think of it as other than His work, since God, as all their national tradition
taught, is One. It interpreted for them, as we might put it in our more cautious
way, the creative reality to which they, with all men, had looked with
uncertainty and even with fear. Henceforth the central hypothesis which men
call God was known as love, and everywhere He was made manifest just in so far
as love had passed out from Christ to the fellowship of the Christian
community." [ccxxxviii]
2

Christ had risen, and by His
Resurrection proved that humanity had in it the seed of life, and that there
was no death for the man who could follow in the steps of the Master.

[235]

In the past, being wholly
engrossed with consideration of the Crucifixion, we have been apt to forget the
fact of the Resurrection. Yet on Easter Day, throughout the world, believers
everywhere express their belief in the risen Christ and in the life beyond the
grave. They have argued along many lines as to the possibility of His rising,
and whether He rose as a human being or as the Son of God. They have been
deeply concerned to prove that because He rose again, so shall we rise,
provided we believe in Him. In order to meet the theological need of proving
that God is love, we have invented a place of discipline, called by many names,
such as purgatory, or the various stages of the different faiths on the road of
departed spirits to heaven, because so many millions die, or have died, without
ever having heard of Christ. Therefore belief in Him as an historical figure is
not possible for them. We have evolved such doctrines as conditional
immortality, and the atonement through the blood of Jesus, in an endeavour to
glorify the personality of Jesus and safe-guard Christian believers, and to
reconcile human interpretations with the truth in the Gospels. We have taught
the doctrine of hell-fire and eternal punishment, and then tried to fit it in
to the general belief that God is love.

Yet the truth is that Christ
died and rose again because He was divinity immanent in a human body. Through
the processes of evolution and initiation He demonstrated to us the meaning and
purpose of the divine life present in Him and in us all. Because Christ was
human, He rose again. Because He was also divine, He rose again, and in the
enacting of the drama of resurrection He revealed to us that great concept of
the continuity of unfoldment which it has ever been the task of the Mysteries
of all time to reveal.

Again and again we have found
that the three episodes related in the Gospel story are not isolated happenings
in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, but that they have been repeatedly undergone
in the secret places of the Temples of the Mysteries, from the dawn of time.
The Saviours of the past were all [236] subjected
to the processes of death in some form or other, but they all rose again or
were translated to glory. In the initiation ceremonies this burial and
resurrection at the end of three days was a familiar ceremonial. History tells
us of many of these Sons of God who died and rose again, and finally ascended
into Heaven. We find, for instance, that "the Obsequies of Adonis were
celebrated in Alexandria (in Egypt) with the utmost display. His image was
carried with great solemnity to a tomb, which served the purpose of rendering
him the last honours. Before singing his return to life, there were mournful
rites celebrated in honour of his suffering and his death. The large wound
which he received was shown, just as the wound was shown which was made to
Christ by the thrust of the spear. The feast of his resurrection was fixed at
the 25th of March." [ccxxxix]3
There is the same legend attached to the names of Tammuz, to Zoroaster, to
Esculapius. To the latter, Ovid addressed the following words:

These words might have been
appropriately addressed to Christ, and they serve to indicate the antiquity of
the Mystery Teaching which, with unbroken continuity, has revealed the divinity
in Man and shown him the Way of a Saviour. But in ancient times these mysteries
were enacted in [237]
secret, and the rites of initiation
were administered only to those who were fitted to pass through the five great
experiences from the Birth to the Resurrection. The uniqueness of Christ's work
lay in the fact that He was the first to enact the whole of the initiation
ceremonial rites and ritual publicly, before the world at large, thus giving to
humanity a demonstration of divinity centred in one person, so that all could
see, could know, believe and follow in His steps.

The same stories are told of
Hercules, of Baldur, of Mithra, of Bacchus, and of Osiris, to mention only a few
of a large number. One of the early Church Fathers, Firmicus Maternus, tells us
that the mysteries of Osiris bear a close resemblance to the Christian
teaching, and that after the resurrection of Osiris his friends rejoice
together, saying, "We have found him." Annie Besant points out in an
illuminating passage that:

"In the Christian
Mysteries—as in the ancient Egyptian, Chaldean, and others—there was an outer
symbolism which expressed the stages through which the man was passing. He was
brought into the chamber of Initiation, and was stretched on the ground with
his arms extended, sometimes on a cross of wood, sometimes merely on the stone
floor, in the posture of a crucified man. He was then touched with the thyrsus
on the heart—the `spear' of the crucifixion—and, leaving the body, he passed
into the worlds beyond, the body falling into a deep trance, the death of the
crucified. The body was placed in a sarcophagus of stone, and there left,
carefully guarded. Meanwhile the man himself was treading first the strange
obscure regions called `the heart of the earth,' and thereafter the heavenly
mount, where he put on the perfected bliss body, now fully organised as a
vehicle of consciousness. In that he returned to the body of flesh, to
re-animate it. The cross bearing that body, or the entranced and rigid body, if
no cross had been used, was lifted out of the sarcophagus and placed on a
sloping surface, facing the east, ready for the rising of the sun on the third
day. At the moment that the rays of the sun touched the face, the Christ, the
perfected Initiate or Master, re-entered the body, glorifying it by the bliss
body He was wearing, changing the body of flesh by contact with the body of
bliss, giving [238]
it new properties, new powers, new
capacities, transmuting it into His own likeness. That was the Resurrection of
the Christ, and thereafter the body of flesh itself was changed, and took on a new nature." [ccxli]
5

Thus we find that the resurrection
story is of very ancient date, and that God has always held before humanity,
through the Mysteries and through His illumined Sons, the fact of immortality,
as before our Christian world, through the death and resurrection of His
beloved Son, Jesus Christ.

This whole problem of death
and immortality is engrossing a great deal of public attention at this time.
The World War brought the fact of death before the public consciousness in a
new and arresting manner. There was scarcely a family in over twenty nations
which had not been bereft by death, in some form or other. The world has passed
through a process of dying, and at the present time the mystery of the
Resurrection is becoming a theme of major importance in men's minds. The
thought of the Resurrection is coming closer, and its significance has been the
central idea of the Masonic Fraternity down the ages, forming the focal point
of the work of the sublime Third Degree. In close relation to this Masonic
"raising" can be placed a little-known sermon of the Buddha, in which
He teaches His disciples the significance of the "five points of
Friendship," and thus links up these five points, the five crises in the
life of Christ and the five points in the Masonic legend. All these references
serve to show the continuity of revelation of which the Resurrection (with its
subsequent Ascension) was the climaxing event for the Occident.

The outstanding need of
Christianity today is to emphasise the living, risen Christ. We have argued too
long over the death of Christ, seeking to impose a narrow sectarian Christ upon
the world. We have fed the fires of separation by our Christian divisions,
churches, sects and "isms." "Their name [239] is legion," and most of them are founded upon
some sectarian presentation of the dead Christ, and of the earlier aspects of
His story. Let us now unite on the basis of the risen Christ—Christ alive
today, Christ the source of inspiration and the founder of the kingdom of God;
Christ, the cosmic Christ, eternally on the Cross, yet eternally alive; Christ,
the historical Saviour, the founder of Christianity, watching over His Church;
Christ, the mystic, mythic Christ, portraying upon the canvas of the Gospels
the episodes of unfoldment so that all who live may know and follow; and
Christ, alive today in every human heart, the guarantee of, and the urge
towards divinity, which humanity so constantly exhibits. Because of the
presence of Christ in man, the conviction of divinity and of man's consequent
immortality seem to be inherent in the human consciousness. It will inevitably
occupy more and more of man's attention until it is demonstrated and proven;
meanwhile that something apparently persists beyond physical death has been
demonstrated. The fact of immortality has not been proven as yet, though it
constitutes a basic belief in the minds of millions, and where such a belief is
universally found, there must indubitably be a basis for it.

The entire question of
immortality is closely linked with the problem of divinity and of the unseen,
subjective world, which seems to underlie the tangible and visible, frequently
making its presence felt. Working therefore on the premise of the unseen and
invisible, it is probable that we shall eventually penetrate to it and discover
that it has always been with us, but that we have been blinded and unable to
recognise its presence. Always some have done so, and their note sounds forth,
strengthening our belief, endorsing our hope, and guaranteeing to us the
eventual experience.

How then shall we recognise
truth or reality when we meet it? How shall we know that a doctrine is of God,
or not? It is so easy to make mistakes, to believe what we want to believe, and
to deceive ourselves in the desire to have our own ideas endorsed by other
minds. The words of Dr. [240] Streeter have
here a definite note of encouragement because they indicate requirements that
are possible for us to follow:

"Even self-deception,
the last stronghold of the enemy, will lose its power in proportion as the
individual conforms to certain conditions which (in the view of the biblical
writers) must be fulfilled to qualify him for the reception of an authentic
message from the Divine—whether at the level of the epoch-creating prophet or
of the simple person rightly guided on the path of everyday duty.

"These are mainly four:

"(1) `I would fain be to
the Eternal Goodness what his own right hand is to a man.' Absolute devotion or
surrender of the self to the Divine. `Here am I, send me,' says Isaiah; and
when Christ addressed to his earliest followers the words `Follow Me,' we are
told they left all and followed Him.

"(2) Self-knowledge, and
the consequent admission of failure. The promise `I will guide thee with mine
eye,' in the Psalm quoted above, is given to the man who has confessed his
iniquity and thereby established a right relationship with God. The first
response of Isaiah to the divine call was that flash of self-knowledge which
brings home to a man a conviction of unworthiness and sin: `I am a man of
unclean lips.'...

"(3) `Tarry ye ... until
ye be clothed with power from on high' (St. Luke XXIV.49). But this life of
power, a power instinct with love and joy and peace, can only with difficulty
be lived continuously except in a fellowship, within which mutual challenge,
mutual encouragement and mutual confession of failure are easy....

"(4) Entrance into such
a life and such a fellowship involves some measure of suffering, sacrifice, or
humiliation. `Whosoever doth not bear his own cross, and come after me,
cannot be my disciple' (Luke XIV.27). It is perhaps not an accident that
already in the Old Testament the promise `Thine eyes shall hear a word behind
thee, saying This is the way, walk ye in it,' is preceded by the words `and
though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of
affliction.'"
[ccxlii]6

It takes courage to face the
fact of death, and to formulate with definiteness one's beliefs upon the
subject. It is a statistical fact that about fifty million people die every
year. [241] Fifty million people are more than the entire
population of Great Britain, and constitute a large group of human beings who
make the great adventure. If this is so, the establishing of the verity of
Christ's Resurrection and the truth of immortality are of far greater
importance than the individual may deem. We are too apt to study these problems
either from the scientific angle or from a purely selfish individual one. Death
is the only event which we can predict with absolute certainty, and yet it is
the event about whichthe majority of human beings refuse to think at
all until faced with the imminent and personal issue. People face death in many
different ways; some bring to the adventure a feeling of self-pity, and are so
occupied with what they have to leave behind, what is about to end for them,
and the relinquishing of all they have gathered in life, that the true
significance of the inevitable future fails to arrest their attention. Others
face it with courage, making the best of what may not be evaded, and look up
into the face of death with a gallant gesture because there is nothing else
they can do. Their pride helps them to encounter the event. Still others refuse
altogether to consider the possibility; they hypnotise themselves into a
condition wherein the thought of death is refused all lodgement in their consciousness,
and they will not consider its possibility, so that when it comes, it catches
them unawares; they are left helpless and unable to do more than simply die.
The Christian attitude, as a rule, is more definitely an acceptance of the will
of God, with the resolution to regard the happening as therefore the best of
happenings, even if it does not seem so from the angle of environment and
circumstance. A steadfast belief in God and His predestined purpose for the
individual carries them triumphantly through the gate of death, but if one told
them that this was simply another form of the fatalism of the Eastern thinker,
and a fixed belief in an unalterable destiny, they would regard it as untrue.
They hide behind the name of God.

Death can, however, be more
than these things, and can be met in a different way. It can be made to hold a
definite [242] place in life and thought, and we can prepare for it
as something which cannot be evaded, but which is simply the Bringer of
Changes. Thus we make the process of death a planned part of our entire life
purpose. We can live with the consciousness of immortality, and it will
give an added colouring and beauty to life; we can foster the awareness of our
future transition, and live with the expectation of its wonder. Death thus
faced, and regarded as a prelude to further living experience, takes on a
different meaning. It becomes a mystical experience, a form of initiation,
finding its culminating point in the Crucifixion. All previous lesser
renunciations prepare us for the great renunciation; all earlier deaths are but
the prelude for the stupendous episode of dying. Death brings us
release—temporary perhaps, though eventually permanent—from the body nature,
from existence on the physical plane and its visible experience. It is a
setting free from limitation; and whether one believes (as many millions do)
that death is only an interlude in a life of steadily accumulating experience,
or the end of all such experience (as many other millions hold), there is no
denying the fact that it marks a definite transition from one state of
consciousness into another. If one believes in immortality and the soul,
this transition may make for an intensification of consciousness; while if the
materialistic point of view dominates, it may indicate the end of conscious
existence. The crucial question is, therefore: Is that which we call the soul
immortal? What is the meaning of immortality?

It is urgent today that we
recover some form of faith in the inner subjective world, and in our relation
to it. Upon this, the success of the work and message of Christ must rise or
fall. These are days wherein everything is being questioned—and the fact of the
soul and its immortality perhaps most of all. This is a necessary and valuable stage,
provided we go on seeking answers to these questions.

Many may regard these
"moral disturbances" as hopeful indications of an emergence from the
static condition in all [243] realms of human
thought which marked the early part of the last century, and that we are today
on the verge of a new era of truer spiritual values. But the newer structures
of faith and conduct must have their foundations deep in the best that the past
has to give. The ideals which Christ enunciated still remain the highest yet
given in the continuity of revelation, and He Himself prepared us for the
emergence of those truths which will mark the time of the end and the
overcoming of the last enemy, whose name is Death.

This questioning of belief,
and this wrestling with an inherent hope must go on until assurance has been
gained, belief has become knowledge, and faith, certainty. Man knows
incontrovertibly that there is a goal greater than his petty aims, and that a
life exists which will embrace his widest reach, enabling him eventually to
attain his highest, though dimly sensed, ideal. A consideration of the
Resurrection may provide a greater surety, provided we keep in mind the long
continuity of revelation given out by God, and realise that we can know little
as yet beyond the fact that Sons of God have died and risen again, and that
behind that fact lies a cause which is basic.

The Tibetans speak of the
process of death as that of "entering into the clear cold
light." [ccxliii]7
It is possible that death can be best regarded as the experience which frees us
from the illusion of form; and this brings clearly to our minds the realisation
that when we speak of death we are referring to a process which concerns the
material nature, the body, with its psychical faculties and its mental
processes. This therefore can be narrowed down to a query as to whether we are
the body and nothing but the body, or whether the ancient scripture of India
was right when it pointed out that:

"Certain is the death of
what is born, and certain is the birth of what dies; therefore, deign not to
grieve in a matter that is inevitable.... This lord of the body dwells ever
immortal in the body of each." [ccxliv]8

[244]

A modern Christian poet has
expressed the same idea in the following beautiful words:

It might here be pertinent to
enquire what it is that we seek to see endure. An analysis of one's attitude to
the whole question of death and immortality can frequently serve to clear one's
mind of indefiniteness and vagueness, with their base in fear, in mental
inertia, and in confused thinking. The following questions therefore come to
one's mind, and warrant consideration.

How do we know that the
process of death brings about such definite changes in our consciousness that
it proves fatal to us, as sentient beings, and renders futile all previous
effort of thought, development and understanding? The wonder of Christ's
Resurrection, as far as His Personality was concerned, consisted in the fact
that, after having passed through death and risen again, He was essentially the
same Person, only with added powers. May it not be the same with ourselves? May
not death simply remove limitation in the physical sense, leaving us with
enhanced sensibilities and a clearer sense of values? This life has moulded us
and wrought us into certain definite expressions in form and quality, and
these, rightly or wrongly, constitute that which is the Self, that which is the
real man, from the angle of human life. There is something in us that refuses
final identification with the physical form, in spite of what science and the
inexperienced may tell us. An intuitive, substantial inner Self steadily
and universally repudiates annihilation, and holds firmly to the belief that
the search and the goal, the values [245] perceived
and for which we struggle, must somewhere, some time, in some manner, prove
themselves worth while. Any other point of view argues for the utter lack of an
intelligent plan in existence, and leads to the despair which St. Paul
expressed in the words: "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we
are of all men most miserable." [ccxlvi]10 We are surely on our way towards
something of value and dynamic worth; otherwise life is a futile process of
aimless wanderings; of caring for a body and educating a mind which have no
worth of any kind, and are of no value to God or men. This, we know, cannot be
the case.

It is the prolongation of
value, of that which is worth while, and the continuation of the persistent,
inner, divine incentive to progress, to create and to benefit others, that
seem, to those who have reached the point where thought is consecutively
possible, to hold the clue to the problem of immortality. The entire story of
Christ goes to prove this. He had, throughout His life of consecrated service
and devotion to His fellowmen, proved that He had reached the point in His
evolution wherein He had somewhat to contribute to the good of the whole; He
had attained altitude on the evolutionary ladder, and His humanity was lost to
sight in the divinity which He expressed. He had that which was of worth to
offer to God and man, and He offered it upon the Cross. It cost Him His life to
make His contribution to the source of the whole body corporate, but He made
it. Because of the worth of what He had achieved, and the value of the livingness
of His contribution, He could demonstrate immortality. It is the immortal value
which survives, and where that value exists the soul needs no more the school
of human experience.

This thought gives rise to
the question: What is it, therefore, that we seek to see survive? What part of
ourselves do we regard as desirably immortal? What in each of us warrants
persistence? Surely none of us seek to see the physical body resurrected,
nor are we anxious again to be trammelled [246] and
confined by the present limiting vehicle in which most of us find ourselves.
Its value seems inadequate for the experience of resurrection and for the gift
of immortality. Nor are we desirous, surely, of seeing the same psychic nature,
with its aggregate of moods and feelings and sentient reactions to environing
condition, hold sway over us again. Equally surely, none of us are pleased to
contemplate the old idea of a sugary heaven wherein we pass our time clothed in
white robes, singing and talking upon religious matters. We have outgrown these
ideas, and to them Christ Himself is a direct refutation. He rose from the dead
and entered upon a life of increased active service. The "other
sheep" which He had to gather must be sought and shepherded; [ccxlvii]11
His disciples must be trained and taught; His followers must be guided and
helped; the kingdom of God must be organised on earth. And still the risen
Christ moves among us, often unrecognised, but busy with the task of world
salvage and service. There is no heaven of peace and rest and inactivity for
Christ whilst we remain unsaved; there is surely none for us who seek to follow
in His footsteps.

When a man's life has gained
significance, then he is ready to tread the path of purification and probation
in preparation for the mysteries; as his significance and influence increase he
can pass, stage by stage, through the processes of initiation, and tread the
path of holiness. He can be "born in Bethlehem," because the germ of
that which is dynamic and living is awakened and is gaining potency and
significance, and must therefore make its appearance; he can pass through the
waters of purification, and attain the mountain-top of transfiguration where
that which is of worth shines forth in all its glory. Having achieved that
moment of heightened experience, and that which he has of value being
recognised by God as worth while, he is then, and then only, ready to offer his
life upon the altar of sacrifice and of service, and can set his face to go up
to Jerusalem, there to be crucified. It is the inevitable end to that which is
of worth. It is the underlying [247] purpose
of the whole process of perfecting, as there is now something worthy to be
offered. But though this may be the end of the physical expression of worth, it
is essentially the moment of the triumph of value, and the demonstration of its
immortality. For that which is of value, the divine and hidden beauty
which life-experience and initiation have served to reveal, cannot die. It is
essentially immortal, and must live. This is the true resurrection of the body.
When the consciousness of value and of worth, and the recognition of
man's reach, as well as his grasp, are considered, the life of service (leading
to death) and of resurrection (leading to full citizenship in the kingdom of
God) begin to gain in meaning. The body which we now have is relatively
worthless; the sum total of moods and mental reactions to which we now submit
is of no value to anyone but ourselves; the environment in which we live and
move has in it surely nothing to warrant its endless perpetuation. In short, a
continuance of the personal self in some heaven which is the extension of our
own individual consciousness, and the concept of an endless eternity lived with
oneself, have for most of us no allurement whatsoever. Yet an aspect of oneself
longs for immortality and the sense of infinity. The "endless prolongation
in time of a self's career" has led to much confusion of thought. Few of
us, if asked seriously to consider the problem and seriously to give an answer,
would feel that as individuals we warrant arrangements being made for our
endless persistence. A sense of truth and justice might lead us honestly to the
conclusion that our value to the universe is practically nil. And yet we
know that there is a value and a reason behind all our life experience, and
that the phenomenal world, of which we are indubitably a part, veils or hides
something of infinite value, of which we are also a part.

We seek assurance that those
whom we love and value are not lost to us. We seek to share with them some
state of happiness which will have in it truer values than any we [248] have known on earth; we long to prolong, in time and
space, the familiar state which we love and cherish. We desire compensation for
what we have endured, and the realisation that everything has had a purpose and
has been worth while. It is this longing, this belief, this determination to
persist, which lies behind all achievement and which is the incentive and
impulse upon which we base all effort. Socrates pointed out this basic argument
for immortality when he said that "no-one knows what death is, and whether
it is not the greatest of all good things. Nevertheless, it is feared as if it
were the supreme evil.... When death comes near to man that which is mortal in
him is scattered; that which is immortal and incorruptible withdraws
intact."

Three thoughts are of
importance in considering this problem of value, which is so amazingly
evidenced by Christ, and which was the true reason why He rose again. His
immortality was based upon His divinity. His divinity expressed itself through
human form, and in that form evidenced value, destiny, service and purpose. All
of these He demonstrated perfectly, and therefore death could not hold Him, nor
could the chains of the grave prevent His liberation.

The first thought is that
immortality is the safeguarding of what we really care about. The factor on
which we place the emphasis in our daily lives survives and functions on some
level of consciousness. We must, and do, eventually attain what we demand. When
we care for that which is eternal in value, then eternal life, free from the
limitations of the flesh, is ours. Dean Inge tells us that "in so far as
we can identify ourselves with the absolute values, we are sure of
immortality." What we really care about, then, in our highest moments,
when free from the illusions of the emotional nature, determines our immortal
life.

The question then arises as
to what occurs when the sense of values is distorted or temporarily
nonexistent. In an attempt to meet this question millions of people have
accepted [249] the Oriental doctrine of rebirth, which states the
world to be the "vale of soul-making," as Keats calls it, and which
teaches that we return again and again to physical life, until the time comes
when our values are properly adjusted, and we can pass through the five
initiations into liberation. Much of the teaching given in the occult and
esoteric books is distorted and fanciful, but that there is much to be said for
the doctrine of rebirth is evident to the unprejudiced student. In the last
analysis, if perfection is to be ultimately achieved, the question is merely
one of time and location. The Christian may believe in a sudden perfecting
through the process of death itself, or in a mental acceptance of the death of
Jesus, which he calls "conversion"; he may regard death as the door
into a place of discipline and development which he calls
"purgatory," where a purificatory process goes on; or he may believe
that in heaven itself adjustments are made and expansions of consciousness are
undergone which render him a different man from what he was before. The
Oriental may believe that the earth provides adequate facilities for the
training and developing processes, and that again and again we return, until we
have reached perfection. The goal remains one. The objective is identical. The
school is in a different place, and the consciousness is unfolded in varying
localities. But that is all. Plato held that:

"Confined in the body as
in a prison ... the soul seeks its pristine sphere of pure rationality by
pursuing the philosophic life, by thinking the universal, by loving and living
according to reason. The bodily life is but an episode in the eternal career of
the soul, which precedes birth and proceeds after death. Life in the flesh is a
trial and a probation; death, the release and the return to the soul's destiny;
to another term of probation, or to the realm of pure reason."

In some place, consciously
and willingly, we must learn to enter and work in the world of values, and so
fit ourselves for citizenship in the kingdom of God. It was the demonstration
of this that Christ gave.

[250]

The second thought which
should be considered is that man's effort, his struggle to achieve, his sense
of God, innate and true, his constant effort to better conditions and to master
himself as well as the natural world, must have an objective; else all that we
see going on around is void, futile and senseless. It was this command of
Himself and of the elements of nature, and the undeviating direction of His
purpose, that led Christ from point to point and enabled Him to open the door
into the kingdom and to rise from the dead, the "first fruits of them that
slept." [ccxlviii]
12

Purpose must underlie pain.
An objective must be sensed under all human activity. The idealism of the
leaders of the race cannot all be hallucination. The realisation of God must
have some basis in fact. Human beings are convinced that the apparent injustice
of the world provides legitimate assurance of a hereafter wherein the integrity
of the divine purpose will be vindicated. There is a basic belief that good and
evil are in combat in man's nature, and that good must inevitably triumph. Down
the ages, man has asserted this. Humanity has evolved many theories to account
for man and his future, for his preparation for the after-life, and for his
reason here on earth. With the detail of these theories there is no need, or
time, to deal. They are in themselves proof of the fact of immortality and of
man's divinity. He has intuited the ultimate possibility, and will not rest
until he has achieved it. Whether it is plurality of lives upon our planet,
leading to an ultimate perfection, or the Buddhistic theory leading to Nirvana,
the goal is one. This latter theory is beautifully summarised in a book dealing
with the secret doctrines of the Tibetan philosophy:

"... when the Lords of
Compassion shall have spiritually civilised the Earth and made of it a Heaven,
there will be revealed to the Pilgrims the Endless Path, which reaches to the
Heart of the Universe. Man, then no longer man, will transcend Nature, and
impersonally, yet consciously, in at-one-ment with all the Enlightened [251] Ones, help to fulfil the Law of the Higher Evolution,
of which Nirvana is but the beginning." [ccxlix]13

Here we have the idea of the
kingdom of God appearing on earth because humanity is spiritually civilised,
and the attainment of the perfection which Christ inculcated.

There is also the doctrine of
eternal recurrence, in which both Nietzsche and Heine believed, with its
emphasis upon a ceaseless, recurrent, earthly existence by each unit of force,
until a soul has been evolved. The dreary doctrine of our survival as
influences perpetuated in the race to which we belong has also been developed,
emphasising a selflessness which is admirable, but is also the negation of the
individual. The orthodox Christian doctrines are three in number, and consist
of the doctrine of eternal retribution, of universal restoration, and of
conditional immortality. To these we must add the speculations of the
Spiritualists, with their various spheres, corresponding somewhat to the subtle
worlds, seven in number, of the Theosophists and the Rosicrucians; and also the
extreme theory of annihilation, which does not find much response from the
healthy-minded. The value of all these doctrines consists in attracting
attention to the eternal interest of man in the hereafter, and his many
speculations as to his future and his immortality.

Christ died and rose again.
He lives. And some people in the world today do not need to have this fact
proven to them. They know He is alive, and that because He lives we shall live
also. In us is the same germ of essential life which flowered forth to
perfection in Him, overcoming the tendency to death inherent in the natural
man. Surely, then, we can say that immortality consists for us in three stages:

First, as that livingness
which we call the urge to evolution, the impulse to progress, to push forward,
to live, and to know that one lives. This is the incentive behind man's
determination [252]
to know himself an individual, with
his own life cycle, his own innate purpose and his eternal future.

Secondly, as that dynamic
spiritual awareness which manifests in the re-orientation to eternity and the
eternal values, which is the distinguishing feature of the man who is ready to
take the necessary steps to demonstrate his spiritual life and to function as
an immortal. Then the resurrection which lies ahead of him, and which Christ
expressed, is seen to be something different from what had earlier been
supposed. The following definition of the true resurrection, as it begins to
dawn on the eyes of the man who is awakening to the glory of the Lord within
his own heart and immanent in every form, finds place:

"The resurrection is not
the rise of the dead from their tombs but the passage from the death of
self-absorption to the life of unselfish love, the transition from the darkness
of selfish individualism to the light of universal spirit, from falsehood to
truth, from the slavery of the world to the liberty of the eternal. Creation
`groaneth and travaileth in pain' `to be delivered from the bondage of corruption
into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.'"
[ccl]14

The third and final thought
which must be emphasised is that we are resurrected to life eternal and become
of the company of the immortals when we have fitted ourselves to be co-workers
with Christ in the kingdom. It is when we lose the consciousness of the
separative individual and become divinely aware of the whole of which we are a
part that we have learnt life's final lesson and need "no more
return." It is the death of the individual which we fear and dread, and
the loss of personal consciousness. We do not realise that when the vision of
the kingdom is ours, when the whole of creation shines forth before our eyes,
it is that Whole which matters to us, and we lose sight of our personal selves.

The resurrection therefore
might be defined as the persistence [253] on into
the future of that which is the divine aspect, and which is integrated with the
life and consciousness of that sum total which we call God. That life and that
consciousness flow through all parts of God's manifestation, the natural world.
The kingdoms of nature have one by one evolved, and in so doing have expressed
some aspect of His life as it informs and animates His creation. One by one,
they have steadily progressed from the inert consciousness and slow, heavy
rhythm of the mineral kingdom, and have revealed sequentially more and more of
the hidden divine nature, until we come to man whose consciousness is of a much
higher order and whose divine expression is that of the self-conscious,
self-determined Deity. From automatic forms of consciousness, the life of God
has carried the forms of life through sentient consciousness to the instinctive
consciousness of the animal; then it has progressed on into the human kingdom,
wherein self-consciousness holds sway, until the higher members of that kingdom
begin to show a disposition towards divinity. The faint, dim signs of a still higher
kingdom can now be seen, in which self-consciousness will give place to
group-consciousness, and man will know himself to be identified with the Whole,
and not to be simply a self-sufficient individual. Then the life of the whole
body of God can flow consciously into and through him, and the life of God
becomes his life and he is resurrected into life eternal.